Chapter 8 #2
They wanted the brain behind the brand, not just the brand itself.
He would have two years in Seattle. Office hours, meetings, the exact kind of tech-world machinery that he had dismantled his whole life to escape.
He closed the email, then opened it again.
Six months ago, he would have just deleted it without even reading past the subject line.
Six months ago, he had been a man who had no ties or obligations and no reason to stay anywhere longer than a lease required.
But six months ago, he hadn’t sat on the floor of a bookstore during a storm and told a woman about his dead brother.
He hadn’t watched a boy solve a puzzle and felt like something cracked open in his chest.
He hadn’t stood on a porch step and said, she’s looking in the wrong places, and meant she should be looking here.
He left the email open on his screen and then went to the back room.
Owen’s photo was on the shelf where it always was.
That tiny fish and his enormous grin.
What would you tell me to do? Grant thought.
He already knew the answer.
Owen would have said, “Close that laptop and go tell her how you feel, you big idiot.”
But Grant wasn’t ready to do that.
The email sat in his inbox like a ticking clock, and for the first time since he had arrived in Seagrove, the quiet that he had built up around himself felt less like peace and more like a cage.
Grant decided his best course of action was to go to the inn.
When he got there, Dawson was sitting on the back porch in one of the rocking chairs, holding a glass of sweet tea.
This was a man who knew how to be alone without being lonely, and Grant had come to appreciate Dawson over the last several weeks.
He was the only person on the island who didn’t try to fill the silence with conversation, which made him the easiest person for Grant to be around.
“Mind if I sit?”
“Help yourself. Sweet tea’s over there on the table.”
Grant poured himself a glass and then sat down in the rocking chair next to Dawson.
The ocean was invisible out in the dark, but he could hear it, the steady rhythm of the waves.
Somewhere down the beach, he could see a bonfire glowing.
They sat in silence for a moment.
Then Grant said, without meaning to, “How did you know?”
Dawson looked at him.
“How did I know what?”
“With Julie. How did you know that she was worth the risk? I mean, you told me the history of your relationship and where she was coming from. That was a lot of baggage for her and for you. So how did you know she was worth the risk?”
Dawson took a slow sip of his tea.
“I didn’t,” Dawson said. “I mean, that’s the honest answer. I didn’t know if it would work. I didn’t know if she’d stay. I didn’t know if she was ready to let somebody close to her again after everything.”
“So what made you try?”
“I realized that not trying was way worse. Living safe sounds good until you’re actually doing it. Then it just feels like you’re living small.”
Grant turned his glass in his hand.
The tea caught the porch light.
Dawson paused for a moment.
“You know, Liza is a good person, Grant. Whatever it is that you’re afraid of, and I’m not asking what that is, she’s worth being afraid for.”
Grant didn’t answer.
He just sat in the rocking chair for another hour listening to the ocean and thought about the difference between living safe and living small.
Before he left, Dawson said one more thing, and he said it in the way Grant had come to realize Dawson said most things: simply, without drama, like he was telling you the weather report.
“You know, this inn almost didn’t reopen. I had a hundred reasons not to do it. Too expensive, too risky, too much of myself on the line.”
He pointed around the porch, to the ocean.
“Best mistake I ever made was ignoring every single one of those reasons.”
Grant nodded and stood up.
He walked back to his house through the dark streets of Seagrove, the air cool on his face and the stars thick and bright above the marsh.
Every house he passed was dark.
The whole island was asleep.
But he was wide awake.
Inside the inn, Julie was sitting at her laptop.
The cursor was moving quickly.
Words were appearing on the screen in an unhurried flow that she hadn’t felt in months.
Francine had handled all the evening check-ins.
The kitchen was clean as a whistle, and Dawson and Julie’s son, Dylan, was sound asleep.
For the first time in longer than Julie had wanted to admit, she was just writing, doing her thing, not managing, not multitasking, not even checking her phone.
Just writing.
The scene she was working on was about a woman standing at a window, watching someone she loved walk away and trying to decide whether she was brave enough to follow.
It wasn’t autobiographical, exactly, but the feeling was real. The particular ache of wanting to hold on and let go at the same time.
She wrote for two hours without stopping.
When she finally looked up, Dawson was in the doorway, looking at her with pride and relief.
“Had a good night?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said and smiled. “A really good night.”
Grant sat at his kitchen table at midnight. He had a fresh grid sheet in front of him and his trusty pencil.
The email from Meridian was open on his laptop across the room. The screen was dimmed but not dark.
He wasn’t looking at it. He refused to.
He was just going to look at the blank grid, which was the one place in the world where his mind made perfect sense.
He started with the theme answers.
In a standard crossword, the theme answers were the long entries, the fifteen-letter phrases that stretched across the grid and gave the puzzle a backbone.
And they were always connected by a hidden thread, a pattern the solver would discover while working through the puzzle.
When the theme clicked, everything would change. The random letters scattered around suddenly had a purpose. The grid stopped being just a collection of words and turned into a message.
He put four theme answers on the grid, each one carefully chosen.
When read in order, top to bottom, the first word of each answer spelled something.
But he wasn’t ready to share the message yet, and he didn’t know if he’d ever be ready.
The grid was taking shape, and the message was there, encoded in the architecture, just waiting for somebody to find it.
And he knew who it was for.
He worked until about two in the morning, filling in the connecting words, crafting the clues, testing it out.
He finally put his pencil down. The crossword was half-finished, and his coffee was ice cold.
He could hear Owen’s voice in his head. Stop hiding behind the puzzles, little brother.
Grant picked up his pencil again and kept going.